Family Album (28 page)

Never my favorite child. Well, one hadn’t thought that one was, and does it matter?

Somewhere, in some deep tender unsuspected crevice, it does.

People get labeled in a large family. Sandra was the pretty one, Roger was clever, Clare was athletic, Paul was the eldest—primogeniture counts for a lot—Katie was helpful. I was difficult, thinks Gina. I was “Gina, don’t be so
difficult
.”

Difficult meant arguing, questioning an instruction or a decision. Being rational, to my mind.

Dad wasn’t so averse to difficultness—he welcomed discussion. Argument on some neutral matter was welcomed. Mum thought this being silly at best, being cheeky at worst.

Gina had realized by the time she was twelve that they were at a crap school. By sixteen, she had found out about sixth-form colleges and that there was one in a town some way away. She applied, was accepted, got hold of the town’s local paper and tracked down a bedsit in the home of an elderly widow, and then took the proposal to her mother. She had already squared matters with the college, who clearly approved of her powers of initiative.

And so it all began. Partial flight from Allersmead at sixteen, full flight to university at eighteen. Detachment thereafter.

“You have an extremely skimpy past,” says Philip. “Or should one say an embargoed past? Do you realize that?”

“I’ve had too much of other people’s,” she replies.

“Oh, indeed—we all have. But you’re the opposite extreme. Information has to be extracted with pincers.”

Gina smiles.

“I’d known you for a couple of months before it became apparent that you had a family. I was beginning to think orphan status, or care of the local council.”

She laughs. “As if . . .”

“And thereafter is not exactly an open book,” he continues. “Radio Swindon has been mentioned—the early days. Some significant assignments since.”

“It’s all in the CV,” says Gina.

“I know. I’ve read it. It’s between the lines I’m interested in.”

“You know about David. You know about my various run-ins with my editors.”

“Indeed. All in the public domain, so to speak. It’s the defining moments I’m after.”

“Oh, those,” says Gina.

They are in the French bistro, which has supplanted the Turkish place. Gina is off to South Africa next week. Both are aware of looming separation.

“The thing is,” she says. “Does one recognize them? Not at the time, that’s for sure.”

“But they surface, don’t they?”

“So does a whole lot of rubbish. Stuff you remember that’s neither here nor there.”

“Ah, that’s not for you to say. Deeply revealing, perhaps.”

Gina reflects. Then: “We’re walking to school and there is a caterpillar with a green stripe down its back on a fence, and Roger puts it in his pencil case. Revealing of what?”

Philip shrugs. “You’d have to take that to a professional.”

Further reflection. “I’m in Bosnia, I think, and our cameraman is sitting by the side of the road eating a slab of bread and cheese. He puts it down for a moment, and a stray dog sneaks up and scoffs it.”

“You’re cheating,” says Philip. “You’re deliberately serving up the junk.”

Possibly. Probably. Gina knows that she is perhaps economical with self-exposure. Why? Well, that too is presumably a matter for the professionals. Suffice it that she prefers not to release too much of all those retrospective moments, even to Philip, whom she loves. One’s interior life is murky enough, in its way; no need to display it to others.

Different kinds of murk, there are. The murk of moments you would prefer to obliterate, when you did something stupid, unpleasant, regrettable. That cameraman: the coda to the dog-and-slab-of-bread moment is that she slept with the man that night, a guy she hardly knew, might not see again, didn’t much care for, and why the hell did she do that? Murk.

But there is that other kind of murk—the times that have slid away into a sort of mist, stretches of time into which you peer, when you see some of what happened, and grope for the rest.

She is in the hall, messing about, pulling faces at herself in the mirror above the table. There is no one else around, which is exceptional, at Allersmead there is always someone else around. She can hear voices from upstairs—Roger and Katie, with Clare piping up from time to time. The others are maybe out. Ingrid went off somewhere, earlier on, which is unusual also. Ingrid has been peculiar lately.

The door to Dad’s study is slightly ajar, and now she hears voices from within. Dad says something, and Mum breaks in, audible, with the pitch that means she is in a state.

“You have to talk to her.”

Dad’s reply cannot be heard.

Mum again, shrill: “If she goes, goodness knows what . . . She
mustn’t
take Clare.”

Gina is idly interested. Take Clare where, and why?

Dad says, “I doubt if we have any right to prevent her.”

Mum, at danger level: “Don’t you
care
?”

Nothing from Dad. Silence.

Mum, quieter now, dangerous in a different way: “This is a family. Clare is part of it. And the situation is all your responsibility. Is it not?”

Dad says, “I am hardly likely to forget.”

Mum is now inaudible. There is a brief flow of sound from which there lifts the occasional words: “. . . hurt . . . shock . . . young . . .”

A silence. Then Dad says, “Indeed. An aberration for which I have paid dearly.”

A what? What has Dad paid for? Gina is now quite attentive, alert to tension, to adults behaving oddly as much as to what is being said. Why are they talking to each other like this?

A floorboard creaks. Someone is moving in the room. As her father opens the door, Gina shoots into the kitchen, just in time.

Radio Swindon seems very far away. Gina today is not exactly a household name, but her face would seem vaguely familiar to very many people. In the Radio Swindon days she was a girl with a microphone, waylaying town councillors and businessmen and people in the street, politely insistent; now, she has the authority of her network, her attendant crew—she is not so easily brushed aside. But she doesn’t feel much different, the game is the same. You muscle in where you may not be wanted, you ask people questions that they may not wish to answer; but also, you inform, you reveal, you communicate. It’s a perverse way to earn a living, she sometimes thinks.

She was programmed from an early age, that is how it now feels: the need to question, to investigate, a certain relish for argument. She cut her teeth on that minister for education, perhaps. She remembers an enjoyable frisson of indignation at this patronizing figure, empowered by status, hectoring the impotent young. I may be young, she had thought, but I can field an opinion or two.

She had considered politics as a career, and then veered away, seeing politicians as self-serving, professionally glib and versatile. Either you bludgeoned your way to the top, or you served time as a quacking backbencher.

Radio Swindon may be far away, but Gina sees that time as climactic. That was when she realized what she wanted to do, what she was going to do. She loved the wayward nature of an interview, its unpredictability. The centenarian who would suddenly erupt into blasphemy, giving pause for thought to the studio editor; the dangerous shoals of vox pop—even in Swindon they could startle you.

Outside a primary school she seeks views on family size from waiting mothers. A parenting guru has advocated two as the ideal extent of a family—three at a pinch; there has been much press comment. Gina feeds some leading questions, hoping to get someone to say that this is the first step towards mandatory limitation, along Chinese lines. The mothers are for the most part uncooperative and their opinions anodyne: it’s nice if you get one of each, then you feel you can stop; of course there’s always the accident, isn’t there? (A giggle.)

Then a woman says, “How old are you, love?”